After touching on the subject, a journalist is accused of having a
colonialist mindset. But it's her critics whose attitude is imperious.

Mac
McClelland traveled to Haiti, reported on one of its rape victims,
developed post-traumatic stress disorder, and coped in an unusual way:
"All I want," she explained, "is to have incredibly violent sex."

She tells her story in an essay
published at GOOD Magazine, where Ann Friedman, formerly of The
American Prospect and the group blog Feministing, is the new executive
editor. The essay, titled "I'm Gonna Need You To Fight Me On This: How
Violent Sex Eased My PTSD," is surely the most provocative piece that
GOOD has ever published. "My mind stayed there, stayed present even when
it became painful," McClelland writes, describing her ostensibly
therapeutic sex, "even when he suddenly smothered me with a pillow, not
to asphyxiate me but so that he didn't break my jaw when he drew his
elbow back and slammed his fist into my face."

Descriptions that
graphic are sure to stoke controversy, as is subject matter like female
sexuality and violent intercourse. We're unaccustomed to women
unapologetically describing sexual urges, wants, and transgressive
behavior*. There's also bound to be skepticism about McClelland's
particular theory of healing.

Far more controversial than the
graphic sex, however, is a short description of Haiti and its dangers
that McClelland included at the beginning of her piece to explain why it
traumatized her so. The average reader likely got through the passage
without pausing, but it so bothered 36 women who've worked in that
country as journalists, activists and development workers that they sent
an open letter to the editor lambasting it. Their argument is our
subject, for it epitomizes some of what's wrong with political discourse
in the United States.

Before grappling with it, let's read the passage that provoked them:

There
are a lot of guns in Haiti. Guns on security guards in front of banks
and gas stations. Guns on kidnappers who make a living snatching rich
people, guns on rich people who are afraid of kidnappers. Guns on the
gang-raping monsters who prowl the flimsy encampments of the earthquake
homeless. Guns in the hands of the 12,000 United Nations peacekeepers,
who sometimes draw them too quickly in civilians' faces and always sling
them carelessly across their laps in the back of UN trucks, barrels
pointed inadvertently at your face while you drive behind them in
traffic...

Last September, the first time I
went to Haiti, I spent my first day out accompanying a rape victim we'll
call Sybille to the hospital. The way her five attackers had maimed her
in addition to sexually violating her was unspeakable. The way the
surgeon who was going to try to reconstruct the damage yelled at her,
telling her she'd got what was coming to her because she was a slut, was
unconscionable. And the way Sybille went into a full paroxysm when we
were on the way back to the post-quake tarp city she lived in was the
worst thing I ever saw in my life. We were sitting in traffic and saw
one of her rapists, and she started just SCREEEAMING a few inches away
from my face, her eyes wide and rolling in abject terror.

This part is relevant too:

...one of the upstanding pillars of the Haitian elite, who insisted he was a
gentleman because he loses his erection if a woman starts to fight him
off, started to stalk me. On the third day, one of my drivers cornered
me in an abandoned building, and I had to talk him out of his threats to
touch me.

The reader is told nothing more about Haiti.
And that upset the signatories of the letter. Their reaction is
understandable: they care about the country, and want the public to
conceive of it fully, rather than imagining that it's an irredeemable
hell hole where no one laughs and people are unlike us. Most of all,
they don't want it to be seen as a place so far gone that outside help
is pointless.

Here is what they might've written, had they been feeling charitable toward a traumatized woman trying to share her story:

Dear Editor,

We
read with interest the essay, "You're Gonna Have To Fight Me On This."
In recounting her experiences in Haiti, the author focuses very narrowly
on the worst things she saw in the country. That's understandable. Her
subject is post traumatic stress disorder, and she couldn't help but
focus on her trauma. The piece is very much in keeping with
journalistic convention. An article about a traumatic date rape on a
college campus wouldn't focus on rendering its cozy student center,
pastoral quads, or the many students who were never victimized.

What
concerns us is the fact that, unlike life on a college campus, the
average American has no broader knowledge of life in Haiti to inform
their opinion of it. We'd hate for your readers to get the impression
that life here is all violent crime and misery. There are safe
neighborhoods too: we've lived and worked in them for many years among
Haitian men and women who've enriched our lives tremendously. They're
doing their utmost to recover from a devastating earthquake. There's an
opportunity to significantly improve lives for sums that are small by
our standards. In fact, donating to one of the international
organizations helping Haitians to get back on their feet is one way to
help address the country's rape problem, which we're eager for Americans
to be accurately informed about. Amnesty International offers what
statistics are known, testimony from victims and context in this report.

Instead, the 36 women published a harangue that condemns McClelland for her "sensationalistic and irresponsible" use of Haiti as a backdrop for her victim narrative.

An excerpt:

In
writing about a country filled with guns, "ugly chaos" and "gang-raping
monsters who prowl the flimsy encampments," she paints Haiti as a
heart-of-darkness dystopia, which serves only to highlight her own
personal bravery for having gone there in the first place. She makes use
of stereotypes about Haiti that would be better left in an earlier
century: the savage men consumed by their own lust, the omnipresent
violence and chaos, the danger encoded in a black republic's DNA.

This
is what a hit piece reads like when it's cloaked in liberal arts school
vernacular. If you scoffed when Pres. Obama was smeared as having a
Kenyan anti-colonial mindset, witness the other side's answer to Dinesh
D'Souza: in their telling, we're to understand the writer by presuming
that she has a colonial mindset. How dare someone travel to refugee
camps plagued by an epidemic of gang rape, get cornered by her driver,
develop PTSD, and focus an essay about her ailment on "ugly chaos"?

Their
tactics are especially galling because McClelland never mentions race
in her piece, but that doesn't stop the signatories from using loaded
terms to imply that she is racially unenlightened (a "heart of darkness"
dystopia with "savage" men). It's easy to make a writer look bad when
you impute to her ugly sentiments she never actually expresses. To
address just one example, McClelland's essay specifically says she is
describing the chaos that developed in the aftermath of the
Haitian earthquake. That's the opposite of saying that violence is baked
into the republic's genetic material. Yet the letter has McClelland
insisting that violence is part of "the black republic's DNA,"
rephrasing what isn't actually her characterization in the most racially
provocative terms possible.

A cursory perusal of headlines
demonstrates that in focusing on Haiti's rape epidemic, McClelland is
hardly alone. "Rape Flourishes in Rubble of Haitian Earthquake," the Los Angeles Timesreports. "Rape at Crisis Level in Haiti Earthquake Camps," says the BBC. "UN Launches anti-Rape Campaign in Haiti," says
CBS News. It certainly seems as if "an earthquake that shook the
country into ugly chaos," as McClelland put it, and that the surfeit of guns
there and the presence of "gang-raping monsters" are accurate
characterizations more than "stereotypes from another century." It is
one thing to say McClelland paints an incomplete portrait, and quite
another to say, against all evidence, that her essay is inaccurate and
rife with racist stereotypes.

The letter goes on:

Sadly,
these damaging stereotypes about the country are not uncommon. But we
were disturbed to find them articulated in Ms. McClelland's piece
without larger context, especially considering her reputation for
socially conscious reporting. Ms. McClelland's Haiti is not the Haiti we
know. Indeed, we have all lived in relative peace and safety there.
This does not mean that we are strangers to rape and sexual violence. We
can identify with the difficulty of unwanted sexual advances that women
of all colors may face in Haiti. And in the United States. And
everywhere.

It isn't fair to say that this paragraph is
loaded with the pathologies of left-leaning political discourse. A
journalist writing in The New York Review of Books or The Nation or The American Prospect would seek to correct alleged misinformation about the prevalence of rape in a country by providing the most accurate available statistics about the prevalence of rape there.

Instead,
these critics proceed with a style of argument that has no name, but is
most commonly found among undergraduate petition writers at academic
institutions where feelings matter more than ideas. They offer no statistics about rape in Haiti, or statements about how crime is geographically distributed. And what is meant by their
vague statements that the signatories have lived "in relative peace and
safety," but that they are not "strangers to rape and sexual violence"?
Nothing very informative. The locution is intended to evoke a benign
Haiti without seeming to diminish its rape victims. In this style of
rhetoric, the whole point is to convey maximum sensitivity and empathy while minimizing the amount of offense that might be taken.

Another
reason for their lack of specificity is soon clear. In the very next
sentence, they craftily stop talking about rape - the writer's subject -
and replace it with the term "unwanted sexual advances" so that they
can assure us they "identify" with its victims in Haiti "and the United
States." Depending on your point of view, they're either enlightened
enough in their anti-colonialism to point out that Haiti isn't the only
country where many sex-related transgressions happen... or else they're
being intentionally vague and evasive about rapes in Haiti to obscure
the glaringly obvious fact that the problem there is different in kind
and degree than it is here.

As if that weren't bad enough, they conclude:

Unfortunately,
most Haitian women are not offered escapes from the possibility of
violence in the camps in the form of passports and tickets home to
another country. For the thousands of displaced women around
Port-au-Prince, the threat of rape is tragically high. But the image of
Haiti that Ms. McClelland paints only contributes to their continued
marginalization. While we are glad that Ms. McClelland has achieved a
sort of peace within, we would encourage her, next time, not to make
Haiti a casualty of the process.

Note that this isn't
offered as a corrective. McClelland never asserted that Haitian women
can escape sexual violence. So why do the letter's signatories mention
that Haitians aren't offered escape "in the form of passports and
tickets home"? They're trying to diminish McClelland's standing by
pointing out her privilege, a particularly unsavory tactic when it
amounts to implicitly criticizing someone for being traumatized even though she had the ability to escape being raped.

Even
more insulting is the notion that McClelland's personal essay on Good
Magazine's Web site is contributing to the continued marginalization
(that is, violent rape) of Haitian women! (Notice that its incidence is
suddenly "tragically high" for "thousands of women," - when it serves
their purposes, they're perfectly willing to evoke displacement camps
that are little "dystopias" of "omnipresent violence.")

It's
absurd that a group of people, castigating a writer for losing sight of
the big picture, proceed to insist that she is personally responsible
for the marginalization of Haitian women, and for making the country of Haiti itself
"a casualty." But it isn't surprising. The signatories are putting
forth rhetorical statements driven by politically correct feeling much more than logic. As
they read McClelland's essay, I have no doubt that they really felt
as if it made a "casualty" of Haiti and marginalized its women. As we
always put it back in my liberal arts school days, "I feel like they're
wrong." I'm all for the American public having as robust an
understanding of Haitian society as possible. In our political
discourse, however, there should be space for writers to tackle fraught
subjects in personal essays without having to ensure that every place
name they mention is fully rendered.

There should also be space
for letters to the editor saying, "I'd like your readers to know a bit
more." What should be verboten are attack letters that rely on guilt
more than logic. The letter at issue may be grounded in the
understandable concerns I tried to address above. But its execution
amounts to little more than vague anecdotes and a poorly argued claim
that McClelland is politically incorrect. Why not try again with actual
facts about crime rates in Haiti?

*Cynics
who say the piece is sensationalistic, or imagine that the piece was
published for the traffic that accrues
to headlines mentioning sex, are probably unaware that these are some
of the gender taboos that Friedman has long been eager to break down.
In this case, the traffic is icing.

About the Author

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

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